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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

> His modus operandi is to take few clever counter-intutive bits and expand into 100s of pages of book.

A lot of books that I routinely recommend are like this. Other popular books are like this. Books on communication, persuasion, sales, negotiation etc. come to mind. The Black Swan is like this. The Innovator’s Dilemma is like this. Non-violent Communication couldn’t fill more than one slide in a slide deck if you distilled it down… it’s basically a notecard’s worth of information stretched across a book with repetition, discussion, and examples.

The non-fiction books which aren’t like this are things like history books (it can be deeply unsatisfying that there is no unifying narrative for a particular topic in history), textbooks, and guides.

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Add How to Win Friends and Influence People to the list. It's easily distilled down to a few notecards at most.

That said, I tried an experiment - I read half the book, and read a summary of the second half. After all, it was getting repetitive. I remember the first half of the book, but not the second. (I should probably go back and read it at some point now.) That repetition, the stories and examples, really helped drive the points home, even if they felt excessive at the time.

yeah, there are many real life examples in that book, but I liked it.

This is called "self-help" genre. It's designed to make you feel positive, may be less depressed. These books communicates to you emotionally via anecdots. But their effects wears off and you are not really going any where.

Throught my years, I have moved from fiction books to popular science (also "non-fiction"). Nowadays I like to read textbooks and research papers. Once you get used to that level of information density, it's hard to go back.

There is plenty of nonfiction out there which isn't mostly unnecessary padding. However, you don't find it very often on bestseller lists.

What would you recommend reading?

Depends what you're looking for, but I found most of Michael Lewis' books to be quite information dense and highly entertaining. The Big Short in particular takes goes very deep down the rabbit hole of finance.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

I guess it can be summarized by "Human behavior is influenced by various factors."

But the breath of these factors and their interaction makes for an interesting read. Robert Sapolsky is an excellent educator.

Haven't read the book, but I liked his lecture series on human behavioral biology: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D

For audiobooks, The Teaching Company courses!

I think the big value from presenting valuable ideas in the form of a book instead of a slide deck is that the reader is more likely to remember and implement the ideas they read from a book versus a slide deck, simply due to span and depth of exposure.

That nobody will pay for a slide deck must be purely incidental!

Eh, Nonviolent Communication is a lot more than that. It's a set of skills you have to practice, so having a book that breaks down each skill with lots of worked examples and scenarios is quite useful.

7 habits isn't like that. So, there are some that have detail, and you need to read them to figure it out. The good thing is you get faster at identifying this over time. I used to have to read every page (perhaps a bad habit from school-years quizzes on books?). Now I can skip through to what I'm interested in and go back for more detail when I want.

The thing is, people judge (non-fiction) books by their width. They'd rather pay a significant amount of money for a merely useful 300 pages book than for a life-changing 10 pages booklet. So, as you say, turn your 10 pages booklet into a 300 pages book with lots of repetition, examples, pictures and testimonials, and buyers will be happy.

Can you please point to a summary of NVC for me? I have really tried but I feel like it is very subtle and doesn’t reduce so well.

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